Espressobin - etherchannel?

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I'd like to make use of great performance of this board regarding SATA performance which is crippled by 1Gbps so my question is, would etherchannel work on this hardware? I understand that the board has only 1Gbps from the switch (dual LAN ports) so I guess the only possible way to exceed 1Gbps output would be to bundle WAN && [LAN01|LAN02]. Anyone tried this or believe it should work? I don't have the board to try.

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It was my understanding that the whole Topaz switch has only the 1 Gbps connection to the SOC, and that all three ethernet ports were from that switch. The labels for wan, lan0, and lan1 are just labels, on switch ports 1, 2, and 3.

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It was my understanding that the whole Topaz switch has only the 1 Gbps connection to the SOC, and that all three ethernet ports were from that switch. The labels for wan, lan0, and lan1 are just labels, on switch ports 1, 2, and 3.

unfortunately you are right, Topaz is connected to SoC via RGMII (1Gbps) so no chance for port channel.

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Currently there is Syba Gigabit Ethernet Mini PCI Express card on Amazon for about $17. That particular card only gets you one additional port, but I have seen options with two ports (although I haven't found any 2-port models anywhere near this price point).

Would it be possible to use a gigabit port on the PCI expansion slot in an etherchannel with one of the ports of the built-in switch to achieve a 2gbps link? I haven't figured out how to configure those built-in switch ports to anything other than the 3-port bridge yet, but I wonder how limited our options are with that Topaz switch in the middle.

If the 2-port gigabit expansion card wasn't so cost-prohibitive, I think the mPCIE slot would have the bandwidth to do 2gbps by itself. Judging by tkaiser's benchmarks of the mPCI SATA expansion board, it looks like he's hitting between 250,000 and nearly 300,000 kiloBytes/sec when using a single drive on the expansion board. Of course that's dependent on the drive and several other factors, but that gives us an upper limit of at least 1.9 to 2.3 gigabits/sec.

And of course this all assumes you're not already using the mPCIE slot for more SATA ports. :-\

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Currently there is Syba Gigabit Ethernet Mini PCI Express card on Amazon for about $17. That particular card only gets you one additional port, but I have seen options with two ports (although I haven't found any 2-port models anywhere near this price point).

Would it be possible to use a gigabit port on the PCI expansion slot in an etherchannel with one of the ports of the built-in switch to achieve a 2gbps link? I haven't figured out how to configure those built-in switch ports to anything other than the 3-port bridge yet, but I wonder how limited our options are with that Topaz switch in the middle.

If the 2-port gigabit expansion card wasn't so cost-prohibitive, I think the mPCIE slot would have the bandwidth to do 2gbps by itself. Judging by tkaiser's benchmarks of the mPCI SATA expansion board, it looks like he's hitting between 250,000 and nearly 300,000 kiloBytes/sec when using a single drive on the expansion board. Of course that's dependent on the drive and several other factors, but that gives us an upper limit of at least 1.9 to 2.3 gigabits/sec.

And of course this all assumes you're not already using the mPCIE slot for more SATA ports. :-\

True, the onboard SATA has it's own direct path, and that's what some of tkaiser's benchmarks were testing...the onboard SATA port vs ports on his mPCIE SATA expansion board. It seems the onboard port is significantly faster, while the tests on the mPCIE SATA ports were limited to roughly 2Gbps. I'm not sure if the bottleneck was the cheap 88SE9215﻿ SATA card, or the mPCIE path. I looked for specs on the mPCIE port, but was not able to determine how many PCIE lanes or what PCIE revision it uses (this might be common knowledge to the community, but I wasn't able to dig it up in a quick search).

A 10Gbps card would be very cool, but in the same test, he came to the conclusion that overall speed using both onboard and mPCIE SATA simultaneously (in RAID 0/striping mode) was limited by the CPU. I know SATA w/software RAID and network benchmarks are very different, but in a real-world scenario, I doubt we'd be able to get anywhere near 10Gbps.

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True, the onboard SATA has it's own direct path, and that's what some of tkaiser's benchmarks were testing...the onboard SATA port vs ports on his mPCIE SATA expansion board. It seems the onboard port is significantly faster, while the tests on the mPCIE﻿﻿ SATA ports were limited to roughly 2Gbps. I'm not sure if the bottleneck was the cheap 88SE9215﻿ SATA card, or the mPCIE path. I looked for specs on the mPCIE port, but was not able to determine how many PCIE lanes or what PCIE revision it uses (this might be common knowledge to the community, but I wasn't able to dig it up in a quick search).

A 10Gbps card would be very cool, but in the same test, he came to the conclusion that overall speed using both onboard and mPCIE SATA simultaneously (in RAID 0/striping mode) was limited by the CPU. I know SATA w/software RAID and network benchmarks are very different, but in a real-world scenario, I doubt we'd be able to get anywhere near 10Gbps.

It looks like we have PCIe 2.0 which supports 500/500MB simultaneous read/write bandwidth. There are some cheap Asus 10Gbe adapters that could possible use all the bandwidth available (read from SATA, write to PCIe and in the opposite direction), so we can see close to 400/400 out of 10Gbe port without RAID overhead. I'm not interested in RAID, just a JBOD performance

Edit: Not sure about the exact wiring in Espressobin and capabilities of shared SERDES lanes among PCIe2.0 and SATA, some research says around 7.5Gbps total throughput, so I'll lower expectations to 3Gbe full duplex speeds with separte 10Gbe card in mPCI slot..

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Edit: Not sure about the exact wiring in Espressobin and capabilities of shared SERDES lanes among PCIe2.0 and SATA, some research says around 7.5Gbps total throughput, so I'll lower expectations to 3Gbe full duplex speeds with separte 10Gbe card in mPCI slot..

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@Spemerchina any chance you could post a link to that 10gb Asus card you mentioned?

My single-port network card arrived from Amazon today, along with a half-size to full-size mPCIE bracket. Everything went together easily and was recognized by Armbian right away. As soon as I booted there was a new "enp0s0" device in "ip link", and with a little fiddling in /etc/systemd/network/ I was able to get it to come up at boot and pull an IP automatically.

Spoiler

File: /etc/systemd/network/10-enp0s0.network

[Match]
Name=enp0s0
[Network]
DHCP=ipv4

Not much time for testing today, unfortunately, and I'll need to bring home a managed switch from work in order to actually test etherchannel performance.

I also ordered this 2-port card from Ebay. It's coming from China so it will be 3 weeks, minimum, but at under $40 I figure it's worth a chance. Of course there are no details on the chip or anything, so there's no telling how much fighting I'll have getting the drivers to work.